The New Physics and Its Evolution eBook

According to M. Blondlot the N rays can be polarised,
refracted, and dispersed, while they have wavelengths
comprised within .0030 micron, and .0760 micron—­that
is to say, between an eighth and a fifth of that found
for the extreme ultra-violet rays. They might
be, perhaps, simply rays of a very short period.
Their existence, stripped of the parasitical and somewhat
singular properties sought to be attributed to them,
would thus appear natural enough. It would, moreover,
be extremely important, and lead, no doubt, to most
curious applications; it can be conceived, in fact,
that such rays might serve to reveal what occurs in
those portions of matter whose too minute dimensions
escape microscopic examination on account of the phenomena
of diffraction.

From whatever point of view we look at it, and whatever
may be the fate of the discovery, the history of the
N rays is particularly instructive, and must give
food for reflection to those interested in questions
of scientific methods.

Sec. 6. THE ETHER AND GRAVITATION

The striking success of the hypothesis of the ether
in optics has, in our own days, strengthened the hope
of being able to explain, by an analogous representation,
the action of gravitation.

For a long time, philosophers who rejected the idea
that ponderability is a primary and essential quality
of all bodies have sought to reduce their weight to
pressures exercised in a very subtle fluid. This
was the conception of Descartes, and was perhaps the
true idea of Newton himself. Newton points out,
in many passages, that the laws he had discovered
were independent of the hypotheses that could be formed
on the way in which universal attraction was produced,
but that with sufficient experiments the true cause
of this attraction might one day be reached.
In the preface to the second edition of the Optics
he writes: “To prove that I have not considered
weight as a universal property of bodies, I have added
a question as to its cause, preferring this form of
question because my interpretation does not entirely
satisfy me in the absence of experiment”; and
he puts the question in this shape: “Is
not this medium (the ether) more rarefied in the interior
of dense bodies like the sun, the planets, the comets,
than in the empty spaces which separate them?
Passing from these bodies to great distances, does
it not become continually denser, and in that way
does it not produce the weight of these great bodies
with regard to each other and of their parts with
regard to these bodies, each body tending to leave
the most dense for the most rarefied parts?”